


Cell Mates (Prisoner of No Confidence Remix)

by poisontaster



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Rape Aftermath, Remix, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-10-17
Updated: 2007-10-17
Packaged: 2018-04-24 08:20:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4912198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poisontaster/pseuds/poisontaster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Iron bars do not a prison make.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cell Mates (Prisoner of No Confidence Remix)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2007 spn_remix. The original work that this is remixed from, Cell Mates, by shay_renoylds, no longer seems to be available, which is too bad. Thanks to mona1347 & technosage for beta work.

_You have watched me, safe in your anonymity_  
_I have dreamed you, held in your security_  
_Some people believe a photograph traps your mortal soul_  
_Your eyes were the camera and you've take hold_  
_And you captured me_  
_I need you to take control_  
_I am a prisoner of no confidence_  
_You've entered me_  
_Now make me whole._  
"The Prisoner" by Howard Jones

 

Sam was fourteen the first time he got arrested. All his baby fat had gone vertical in the past couple years and he couldn't eat enough to keep up with it.

He'd been shoplifting.

He hadn't been careful enough.

His dad was going to _kill_ him.

Just Sam's luck, he got stuck with a bunch of cops with their own version of Scared Straight, sticking him in the gen pop cell with all the hard-core guys and drunks and junkies. Oh, nothing really bad happened; Sam got pushed around a bit, fondled a bit, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle. Nothing that would leave a scar, external or internal.

Even so, Sam hadn't breathed once until they were pushing him out the door and into his Dad's arms.

"You stink, kid." Dad's voice sounded genial, but the bracelet of his fingers around Sam's bicep was harder than the handcuffs.

This was everything that was wrong with Sam's life.

Of course, it wasn't Sam's first time around the block. The first time he was ever in a police station, he was six and Dean was ten. Dean had muttered and fumed about the landlord that ratted them out, two kids alone in an apartment. Sam had drawn pictures on the back of blank arrest forms from last year.

It was ten hours before their "uncle" Jim showed to pick them up. He did a lot of muttering and fuming, too, on the drive back to Blue Earth. Sam sat wedged between the two of them, Dean's elbow in his side, nodding out and waking up every time Jim pounded the wheel with the flat of his hand.

There's a particular smell to police stations, universal, no matter where they are. Sickly-sweet and sweat-raw. Rank. When he was little, he didn't mind it so much. His life had been filled with strange, bad aromas, mystical and mundane.

That changed when he was twelve, waiting with Dad for Dean to be released and afraid he was going to barf all over the peeling linoleum. It wasn't just the smell and it had nothing to do with how he'd _been_ feeling.

Sam had been sick for the past two weeks, feverish and weak. Their pharmacy cache ran to painkillers, mild to heavy-duty, not antibiotics. It was a familiar story; Dad preached patience, Dean took matters into his own hands.

With predictable results.

Dean had a black eye when he walked out from Holding, and blood on his knuckles. But he was grinning fit to beat the band.

"All right, Dean," the desk sergeant called, a fat and lazy man who had glared death at Sam each time he coughed or sniffled. "You keep your nose clean."

Dean raised a hand over his head to wave. "Will do, Sgt. Kenny. You lay off those Twinkies, man. That stuff'll kill you."

Sam slouched lower on the uncomfortable bench and wondered if he'd die of pneumonia or embarrassment first. But instead Dad tugged at his arm, half-lifting him off the bench. "Come on, Sammy, let's go."

In the car, Dad was angry, but he didn't yell. "You gotta be more careful than this, Dean."

Dean ducked his head anyway, tense and unhappy. "I know. I'm sorry, sir."

_No,_ Sam had thought. _That's wrong. You need to stop doing this. We all need to stop doing this._

But he knew that was never going to happen, even then.

The first time he and Dean were jailed together, Sam was sixteen and Dean twenty. They were about equally drunk and Sam hated his brother.

He'd hated his brother a lot, in those days. Not as much as he'd hated his Dad, but really? More days than not, Sam had hated the whole world.

"Buck up, Sammy!" Dean's arm squished Sam's shoulders together painfully. "At least we're in this together, right?"

Sam didn't lift his head from his supporting hand. "Dad's going to kill us."

Dean sighed and stretched his legs out. "Better him than Bubba over there in the cell 'cross the way."

"This is all your fault."

"My fault?" Dean sounded outraged. Dean was good at sounding outraged, even when it was totally unwarranted. "How was I supposed to know she was a cop?"

Sam's head jerked up—a mistake, as it turned out. His stomach sloshed uneasily. "I don't need you to…buy girls for me!"

Dean nudged Sam in the side with his elbow. "Not like you're getting the action on your own, Sam."

Sam didn't even plan it, wasn't sure how it happened. Just the next thing he knew, Dean was sprawled on the floor instead of the bench and Sam's knuckles stung.

Dean wiped the blood from his nose with one finger and looked at it before his bleary gaze rose back to Sam's and he grinned. There was gore on his teeth too.

A second later, Dean tackled Sam with a flurry of rabbit punches to his ribs. Sam could tell Dean was pulling them, that Dean was just _playing_ , and the fury that punched up from Sam's boot heels had to rival Hellfire, streaking his vision in red. Sam growled and blocked Dean's next punch, and then ground his fingers in the shoulder Dean had dislocated a week ago. Dean gasped and his stupid shit-eating grin slipped a little, but he didn't let up, twisting Sam's fingers back until it was either give or break.

Sam wriggled wildly, taking an elbow to the cheek. His and Dean's knees crunched together in an explosion of cartilage but Sam refused to give Dean the satisfaction of yelling. "I hate you," he gritted through his clenched teeth, eyes grainy and burning. "I fucking _hate you_."

Dean's mouth pinched flat as he wrestled Sam's resisting arms up, over Sam's head. "Yeah, well, you're a punk who doesn't know how good he's got it."

"Get offa me!"

"Make me."

Sam tried. He had the height and reach, but Dean was still heavier, older and fought dirty.

The next part Sam would like to block out of his mind forever, but with the perversity of memory, he remembered all of it, every second, rendered in details and colors almost too vivid to be real.

He remembered the weight of Dean on his legs and the bite of Dean's elbows on his shoulders, the cuff of Dean's fingers around his wrists. He remembered how much Dean's breath stank, sour with old beer and Jim Beam and cheap, stale pretzels consumed by the handful.

He remembered the way Dean's face…faltered when he realized Sam was hard.

He remembered the moment he realized _Dean_ was.

A couple seconds—an eon—later, the deputy came in and hauled them apart, dragging Dean out and grumbling the whole time.

Afterward, Sam remembered thinking, _This is it. This is the last fucking time._

He was done with this endless procession of jails, claustrophobic and nasty, weighing him down like cement blocks piled on his chest.

It wasn't the last time, of course, though there were years he was allowed the luxury of _believing_ it was true. He ran away and came back and found everything was simultaneously different and the same. That _Dean_ was different and the same.

_This, on the other hand_ , Sam thought, looking around the Danville drunk tank, _is not so different._

Mostly he noticed the smell. That familiar, hateful smell. It still turned his stomach and transformed the bones of his shoulders to tensed iron. He was older now, though, if not wiser, and he pretended nonchalance as he slouched on the flaking bench, aching legs stretched out in front of him.

_Dean's coming,_ he reminded himself, training his gaze on the ceiling. _Chill out. Dean's going to come._

There was no way he was getting any sleep tonight.

After Danville, it was Gillet; Dean on the wrong side of the bars and Sam maxing out every phony credit card they had to scrape up bail.

Something happened in Gillet. More than the smeary yellow-black bruises and angry red scrapes on Dean's face and neck. More than the sprung knee. Dean wouldn't talk about it, but Sam's shameless brother started getting dressed in the bathroom in thick, long-sleeved layers that were more like Sam's mode of dress than Dean's. Some of the cocky had been knocked out of him, and he touched Sam more; hand on Sam's shoulder, the back of his neck, bumping elbows and knees and ankles.

In their battered and much-thumbed atlas, Sam drew a thick **X** in black marker through Gillet.

It bothered him, but not in the way it used to. It was different. Personal in ways he hadn't expected.

In Morgan, Sam was cleaning the smut off his hands—Morgan wasn't big enough to have electronic fingerprinting yet—when he caught the look in Dean's eyes. Pupils shrunk down to little pinpricks and the whites gleaming large, Dean paced the cell, shoulders getting blockier by the second.

Sam got to his feet and went over to Dean, touching him lightly and fully expecting the half-hearted punch Dean directed his way. Sam held onto Dean's fist, stepping closer. As he'd guessed, Dean stepped away. Sam edged closer again. Dean glided uncertainly back.

"W-what are you doing?" The stammer was slight enough that Sam could and did ignore it. He didn't need details to get the gist.

"Nothing's going to happen to you," Sam said conversationally.

Dean flinched. His eyes tap-danced and skittered everywhere except at Sam. "What? I know that."

"I won't let anything happen to you," Sam continued, relentless.

And really, the words were for Dean, were supposed to be for Dean, but he said them and he felt something in his own gut change and shift. It wasn't a bad feeling. Just the opposite.

The crowding walls opened and receded, even as Sam forced Dean into a smaller and smaller space, without retreat.

"I've got your back, Dean."

Dean's eyes closed but his face tipped up, just a little, and it was natural as anything for Sam to tilt down and brush his lips over his brother's.

"You think I'm some delicate flower, Sammy?" Dean's smile was crooked—a bad fake—when Sam pulled back. His eyes looked squinty and hard. "I'm fine."

"I know you are." Sam wasn't lying and he knew Dean heard it in his voice, read it in his face.

Dean breathed, scared, huffing breaths. Then his hands came up and Sam lips came down and they were somewhere else for a while.

Later.

Later.

Later, later, later…

The truth was that Sam hated jail. He was always going to hate it and there was just no way around that.

But there was more to his life than an endless procession of jail cells.

_If you love something, let it go,_ Dean whispered into the skin and hair and muscle of Sam's thigh, stroking, kissing, scratching with short, jagged nails. _If it comes back to you, it's yours forever._

Sam smiled and reached down, pulling Dean up, pulling them together. _Iron bars do not a prison make,_ he answered in return, words of his own heart and his own making, and then there was nothing else to say.


End file.
